Throwback Thursday: What Do You Remember About Rosemary Rogers’s Sweet Savage Love?

Today we thought we'd join in on Throwback Thursday (or #TBT, in social media), and ask you to recall one of the most iconic romance novels from the 1970s, Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love.

The vibrant young daughter of a U.S. senator, Ginny Brandon has tasted only the sweetest of life's pleasures until fate carries her far from the safety of her home. Now the courageous, flame-haired beauty is lost in Steve Morgan's world, the captive prisoner of a dashing and dangerous soldier of fortune caught up in the turmoil of the American West.

I still have a soft spot for SSL, even though now it is controversial. It was (along with Kathleen Woodiwiss) groundbreaking and as one who always was a big reader, this book blew me away. I think more than the sex, it was the vast sweeping vistas and history. I always loved western based stories and when this one came along, it became an instantly loved book. Nowadays, it seems that it is politically incorrect to say I loved it, which given all the very popular erotica out there now, seems a wee bit hypocritical, IMO. But I did. The years have changed our way of looking at bodice ripper books, but remember, this was also during the hugely popular General Hospital Luke & Laura story, which if you are unfamiliar with, also included a rape/falling in love story.

IMO, this book (along with some others of the era) was more about the big, deep, meaty, visual story, rather than a love story. Too many of today's historicals tend to be softer and not very deep, which is why I have a lot of problems with many of them. I like a deeper historically based story first, then love/sex secondary.

There was only one other RR book that I really liked too, and that was The Wildest Heart. Didn't like her contemporaries at all.
BTW, this is coming out in kindle in July. First time it's been digitally formatted

It made me want to track the "hero" down and cut his balls off. However, when I read The Insiders, one of her contemporaries, I wanted to track the hero down, cut his balls off, and set them on fire in front of him.

I remember sex under a wagon, the heroine in a brothel, the hero being an ass and me lapping up every bit of it. I never thought of it as a romance, though. I equated it more with the woman's fiction/life journey type books.

Oh my Gawd, but I loved this book, or at least those parts I understood considering how young I was when I read it ( 11? 12?) I remember a lot, but most of all, my favorite scene at the end when Ginny comes home finally and finds Conception in Steve's bed...and throws her out. Closely following is my second favorite scene when Steve comes back and finds Ginny in her place...

There's a lot of rape and rapey love scenes in RR's books & in Steve & Ginny's opus particularly, but there's also a lot about Ginny (and later her daughter) exploring her sexuality and agency that arguably could be seen as ahead of her time.

Also, I agree about the deep and sprawling historical aspect of SSL and the rest of the series. That's a lot of what drew me to RR and Woodiwiss too and formed a lot of my early love of history because novels like this were chock full of those details and beaucoup de research. I think Ginny is also a great example of a Mary Sue character in the sense that every man who looked at her wanted her so badly, he'd commit crimes to be able to bed her. I remember being exasperated that yet another man wanted to bed her to the exclusivity of all other women. But she was also a character who used what she had (sometimes sexually) to get what she wanted/needed. And for a "romance", Steve and Ginny spent a lot of time apart, one time each of one thinking the other was dead and then just being pissed at each other and at one point thinking they were divorced when they (naturally) really weren't.